All Over the Place

It’s been a busy week, so I thought I’d just point visitors to a grab bag of posts. It being barely over a week since The Bones of the Old Ones was released, some new reviews have been released, but I wanted first to talk about an excellent series of essays about the Edgar Rice Burroughs Mars series.

Black Gate’s excellent essayist Ryan Harvey (really, why doesn’t this guy have a paying gig doing this kind of thing?) read every single Burroughs Mars book over the course of the last year, detailing highs, lows, weirdest moments and generally providing the kind of overview that I have always wanted. Me, I’ve read and enjoyed a little over half of the eleven books, and thanks to Harvey’s reviews I now have a pretty good idea about which ones I will probably skip. Harvey’s talented, honest, and funny, and any fan of the Mars Burroughs stuff –or anyone curious about the series- should visit these, pronto. Here, Part 11 links to all of the preceding sections.

And now let’s see what’s going on out there that’s about ME.

First, Mary Robinette Kowal invited me to her new essay series “My Favorite Bit” and I briefly borrowed her blog to talk about my favorite part of The Bones of the Old Ones. During this whole promotional push, this is one of the essays of which I’m most proud.

Five contestants were chosen at random from a book give away contest at Reddit and will be receiving signed copies of both The Desert of Souls and The Bones of the Old Ones. All participants were there to discuss their favorite fantasy setting, world, or culture, and a few of them asked me questions. I offered my two cents on some of my favorite settings throughout the thread.

I was asked to write about what was happening on page 69 of The Bones of the Old Ones as part of an ongoing series about that very page number involving a wide variety of writers, and then asked to contribute an essay to a series titled “My Book, The Movie.”

Finally, while I have been drafting away on writerly projects and aiming at deadlines, a whole new set of reviews have flowed in:

If you find any other Bones sightings, please drop me a line here and let me know! And do help spread the word if you have enjoyed one or both books. I will sincerely appreciate it. If you happen to like, or love, The Bones of the Old Ones, I hope you’ll stop by Goodreads and Amazon — which tend to be the places where people surf to find reactions — and record your reaction.